HBO’s ‘Escape From Kabul’ Goes Inside the Afghanistan Evacuation From Hell
A year later, the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan is still a blur.
For those of us watching from afar, the hasty airlifts looked more like the climax of a war movie than a coordinated military operation by the world’s only superpower. The month of August 2021 was filled with minute-to-minute updates on the chaos: the desperate masses trying to escape, the rapid advance of the Taliban, the terrorist attack at the Kabul airport, and the thousands of migrants filing into planes and arriving at makeshift resettlement centers across the world.
Now, director Jamie Roberts and the team at Amos Pictures have turned those events into a documentary, Escape From Kabul, premiering Wednesday on HBO Max. In a tight 77 minutes, Roberts merges hours of on-the-ground footage with stirring interviews from Afghan evacuees, American troops, and the Taliban for a compelling look into the human instinct to survive. We watch, for instance, as people stand in a flooded sewage canal in unbearable heat, hoping that a U.S. Marine will take pity on them and pick them out for resettlement. In another disturbing scene, a group of Afghan citizens, feeling like they have nothing to lose, hop on the wing of a massive C-17 military plane. The crowds rush toward the aircraft, but the American troops overseeing the evacuation still don’t know who’s who in the melee. The plane is ordered to take off, and a single body falls and splatters on the runway.